Apocalypse Yet?

Originally posted 10/16/23

It was the summer of 1988. I had just graduated from high school and was looking forward to starting college in the fall. I was working for my church denomination, the Evangelical Church of North America, as a “summer missionary.” I was part of a team of about ten high school and college-aged kids deployed throughout Oregon and Washington to hold summer day camps at local churches, mostly in small towns. As the word “missionary” implies, our goal was to share our Christian faith with anyone who would listen, but mostly with our young campers. We spent most of our time distributing snacks and monitoring the giant slip-n-slide we constructed with plastic sheeting and garden hoses. During our time off, we enjoyed floating on rivers, swimming, playing UNO and Skip-Bo, and, naturally, talking about what we believed was Jesus’ very imminent return.

The “Rapture” refers to a time, anticipated by evangelical Christians, when Jesus will come from heaven to earth to “take up” faithful believers into heaven before the final judgment. It will be sudden and unpredictable. Hence, the famous bumper sticker, “In the case of the rapture, this car will be unmanned.”

Even though the Rapture is an important part of evangelical belief, it is not something unequivocally described in the New Testament. Instead, the idea of the Rapture reflects a piecing together of select Bible verses that are read through the lens of end-times thinking. (The nineteenth-century Englishman John Nelson Darby is often credited with being one of the first to piece together these scriptural bits.) These verses include descriptions of Jesus talking about the coming of the “Son of Man,” a messianic figure described in Daniel 7:13-14. In the Gospel of Mark, for example, Jesus mentions that the Son of Man will come in power and glory and gather his followers from the ends of the earth (13:26-27). Even though Jesus uses the third person, as though he understands the Son of Man as someone else, proponents of the Rapture interpret this as Jesus being self-referential (see also Luke 21:25-36 and Matt 24:30-21).

The writings of Paul, which actually predate the Gospels, provide further sources for understanding the Rapture. In 1 Thessalonians, Paul describes the Lord, presumably the risen Christ, coming from heaven and meeting faithful Christians “in the air” so that they can dwell with him in heaven. At the same time, the dead will be resurrected, so they, too, can be with the risen Christ (1 Thess 4:13-5:11). In 2 Thessalonians, Paul (or someone writing in his name) “nuances” what was described in his previous letter, adding information that seems like it should have included in the first description of Jesus’ return. Namely, 2 Thessalonians adds that the “gathering up” of the faithful will happen after a “Lawless One” comes first (2 Thess 2:1-12). I won’t even go into the situation, which will happen in a “twinkling of an eye,” described by Paul in 1 Corinthians 15.

A third text that often gets included in discussions of the Rapture is the description of Christ ruling on earth with the saints in Revelation 20:4-6. Even though Revelation does not describe the faithful “beaming up” to Jesus, this passage is one that evangelical interpreters must reconcile to their ideas about Rapture.

If you’re someone who likes puzzles and riddles, you can see how fitting these pieces together (and these are just some of the verses cited) might be compelling. Getting a fix on the Rapture is kind of like sorting through the clues pinned to the “murder board” in Only Murders in the Building.

The summer missionaries’ interest (obsession might be a better descriptor) in the Rapture was prompted by a free booklet circulating throughout our church denomination. As the booklet’s title suggests, the author, a supposed NASA engineer turned apocalyptic prophet named Edgar C. Whisenant, believed the Rapture would occur in September 1988. More precisely, Jesus would return sometime during a three-day period in September. The three-day window side-stepped Jesus’s warning that no one would know the day or the hour of these events (Matt 24:36). I mean, he never said anything about not knowing the month or the week!

Whisenant specifically linked the event to Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. Rosh Hashana conveniently, for those who believe in the Rapture, includes the ritual blowing of the shofar, which is kind of like Paul’s description of a trumpet blowing at Jesus’s return (1 Thess 4:26). Yom Kippur similarly lines up with the evangelical belief that the Rapture is connected to judgment since the Jewish holiday is said to be the day that one’s deeds are recorded in the Book of Life. Evangelical visions of the Rapture are often a kind of nefarious appropriation of Jewish culture, called Christian supersessionism.

But, back to me.

I grew up in a home where conversations about prophecy and concern for the coming end-times, something I’ll call “apocalyptic thinking,” was common. My maternal grandfather’s family, ethnic Germans living in Russia who were dispersed to Siberia and labor camps, had lived through Stalin’s reign of terror and believed they were living during the end-times tribulation. My mom and her sister, my Aunt Lois, shared books by authors like Hal Lindsey and Billy Graham, which explained how modern political figures and institutions aligned with Old Testament prophecies and the Book of Revelation.

At the same time, my parents were not the kind to sell their possessions and wait for the thunder and lightning signaling the coming of the “Son of Man.” My dad was a millwright welder who liked hunting and fishing, and my mom was a public school librarian dedicated to inspiring young readers. Together, they enjoyed life in the present–taking road trips to visit family, spending time on the coast, and going to musicals when they could. They taught me to enjoy life, but the idea of Christ’s return always lingered in the background.

This was the heart of my dilemma in 1988: I wanted to go to college, be on the speech and debate team, and make new friends, but I was also worried that these opportunities would be cut short by Jesus’s bad timing. I knew this concern signaled a lack of faith, a questioning that today I interpret as being human. My lack of zeal, including a reluctance to share the news of the coming end with friends who hadn’t already bought into the idea, was a sure indication that I would not be among those gathered with Christ in the clouds. In fact, I harbored deeper fears about the coming of Christ since I was questioning church teachings, including the claim that Christianity was the only way to salvation. Even though I couldn’t articulate my queerness at the time, I had misgivings about whether I was the kind of person who fit into the vision of heaven I had been given. I was afraid of being found out as a fraud at Christ’s return.  

To my relief, Jesus did not return in 1988. Like many people who experience apocalyptic disappointment, I took this as a reminder to heed Jesus’s warning about the “date and time.” In other words, I didn’t join those who recalculated the end-times timeline. Instead, I started to think about faithfulness in other ways, engaging teachings about social justice and exploring more philosophical ideas about God. Although I attended a conservative Christian college (i.e., no dancing, drinking, smoking, swearing, sexing), there I joined a student group interested in AIDS activism and even spent a semester away from campus working with a group trying to right some of the wrongs of systemic racism in a Fort Worth, TX neighborhood. Instead of waiting to be taken into the coming New Jerusalem, I was persuaded that Christians were called to create the heavenly city on earth.

Don’t get me wrong, my experience of “coming out” from apocalyptic disappointment and eventually evangelical Christianity has not been simple or linear. The tale I offer here skips over significant events and many difficult, even traumatic, experiences related to coming out as queer and as a lesbian. Those are things I am still processing.

I don’t think my story of recovering from apocalyptic disappointment is unique. What is unusual is that I became a scholar of Revelation, finishing both a Master of Divinity degree and a Ph.D. in New Testament. With some prodding from my PhD advisor, I focused on Revelation and wrote my dissertation on the book. I’ve often described my academic work as an attempt to understand the power of Revelation’s language and imagery. I’m interested in how this book persuades people of all kinds to imagine the world around them in apocalyptic terms. I’m curious about how the text shapes the ways people think, feel, and act. In this forum, I hope to explore this and other related interests.